10 Awesome Productivity Apps To Help Manage Your Hectic Life

Smartphones have transformed the role of communication devices in our lives. High-end processors and 3G technology of new age smartphones have made them an indispensable gadget in improving our lifestyle. Numerous productivity apps such as calendars, to-do lists, reminders, cloud storage and note-taking apps are available that help managing your hectic life schedule. 10 simple productivity apps that will help you manage meetings and organize work better are enlisted here.

Evernote provides one workspace to make notes, organize them and present your ideas in a systematic way. It provides cross-platform note taking services which makes it incredibly easy to create and manage notes across devices. It allows the user to upload images, audio and videos besides taking notes. The app offers excellent formatting and organization features that make it one of the best apps for collecting notes. It is easy to present your work to colleagues while it is taking shape as Evernote allows you to build a screen-friendly layout of your notes.

Any.do is a simple app that is rich in features. The app allows you to create reminders, events, to-do lists, notes and more. It is a cross-platform app that will help you manage your daily schedule effectively. It is an award winning app for its intuitive user interface and innovative features. It only takes a couple of minutes to organize your day with this simple app. It renders seamless sync across devices and an extension is available for Chrome users. You can manage your tasks with your Chrome browser. Calendars and reminders will help you track personal events in your life. With exhaustive features, this app enables you to balance your work and life.

Fantastical 2 is an app designed for iOS that will make you more productive with its flexible features. It helps you manage your events with a categorical presentation of daily, weekly and monthly events powered with reminders. Event management becomes incredibly simple with Fantastical 2. It provides seamless iOS reminder integration and allows you to send birthday wishes from Facebook and Twitter accounts. DayTicker is a convenient way to view your schedule. It provides a quick view of your everyday schedule.

Due is another app specifically designed for iPhones and iPads that allows you to jot down tasks and set reminders quickly. Using an exclusive app to track tasks is a good way to de-clutter your calendar. It is extremely easy to modify reminders with Due. If there is a change of plans, you can reschedule your plan by editing the reminder on the fly. This one-tap option to manage events makes it a simple app for managing events. The app also provides persistent reminders with auto snooze options. Until you mark the task as complete or reschedule the task, the auto snooze repeatedly notifies you of a task. Another excellent feature that sets it apart from other apps is the ability to send reminders to friends and colleagues.

Dropbox is one of the earliest apps that gave birth to the idea of online storage locker for documents. You can post files, images, videos and other data in your Dropbox and access them from anywhere. Data is secure in a Dropbox and it offers a safe backup option. The files are encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption and there is a two-step verification process. All data stored in a Dropbox is by default private. Dropbox is a powerful app for small-sized business as it offers a secure and convenient way to manage data. It provides seamless collaboration which caters to the needs of offices.

Business Calendar Pro has amazing customization and task integration features which make it easy to manage events. Multi-select option is a convenient way to move, copy or delete multiple events simultaneously. Multi-select mode can be enabled from agenda and day view. The app allows you to drag and drop an event to a new date and time providing a simple way to reschedule events. You can easily import or export your calendar in iCalendar format which can be sent via mail.

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This is an uncomplicated to-do list app that provides pertinent features. TickTick is a cross-platform app that provides Gmail integration besides seamless synchronization across android, iOS and web platforms. You can easily convert an email into a to-do list with Chrome extension. It also allows you to create a back-up of your lists on web. You can customize your notifications so that you receive reminders that help you meet deadlines. TickTick allows you to set multi-level priorities for the items in your to-do list which helps manage your activities efficiently. Another striking feature of TickTick is the ability to send location-based reminders. You can configure reminders to be sent when you leave or arrive at a specific location.

It is a simple note-taking application for both Android and iOS devices. Google Keep has stuck to the basics of note-taking by allowing users to create a collection of sticky notes. It enables you to quickly note down what is on your mind and remind you later when required. You can attach photos to your notes and lists. You can also record a voice memo that gets transcribed by Keep. One of the most interesting features of Google Keep is the ability to color code your notes what helps you organize them effectively. You can access your notes from anywhere as it syncs your notes across devices. It is a simple and an effective note-taking app.

To-Do Calendar Planner is a great app to organize and manage your tasks. It is a powerful tool that helps you link your personal goals to tasks enlisted. You can schedule tasks directly on the calendar, set multiple reminders for an appointment and write notes for specific appointments. The tasks can be seen in a daily, weekly or monthly view. You can get yourself organized effectively by dividing your task into sub-tasks and setting specific goals. You can synchronize with Google calendar as well. It also provides a clean-up feature that helps you prioritize your tasks. To-Do Calendar Planner is an all-in-one personal organizer that will improve your productivity.

Wunderlist is an amazing to-do and task list app that allows you to share your lists with friends and colleagues. It helps people share their ideas and aspirations through lists of places to visit, project deadlines and more. The app is available on almost all platforms including android and iOS. It is an ideal app for home, work and play. Your list is available across all devices with real-time sync feature. It enables real-time collaboration of your efforts with colleagues. With intuitive design, Wunderlist is extremely fast and convenient to use.

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Organizing your work is extremely important to prioritize and meet crucial deadlines on time. You will be able to enjoy your work more and stay stress-free when you are better organized. These productivity apps will help you manage your work better and save time for your personal needs. These apps will enhance your lifestyle in more ways than you can imagine.

7 Tools to Help Keep Track of Goals and Habits Effectively

Now that 2011 is well underway and most people have fallen off the bandwagon when it comes to their New Year’s resolutions (myself included), it’s a good time to step back and take an honest look at our habits and the goals that we want to achieve.

Something that I have learned over the past few years is that if you track something, be it your eating habits, exercise, writing time, work time, etc. you become aware of the reality of the situation. This is why most diet gurus tell you to track what you eat for a week so you have an awareness of the of how you really eat before you start your diet and exercise regimen.

Tracking daily habits and progress towards goals is another way to see reality and create a way for you clearly review what you have accomplished over a set period of time. Tracking helps motivate you too; if I can make a change in my life and do it once a day for a period of time it makes me more apt to keep doing it.

So, if you have some goals and habits in mind that need tracked, all you need is a tracking tool. Today we’ll look at 7 different tools to help you keep track of your habits and goals.

Joe’s Goals

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Joe’s Goals is a web-based tool that allows users to track their habits and goals in an easy to use interface. Users can add as many goals/habits as they want and also check multiple times per day for those “extra productive days”. Something that is unique about Joe’s Goals is the way that you can keep track of negative habits such as eating out, smoking, etc. This can help you visualize the good things that you are doing as well as the negative things that you are doing in your life.

Joe’s Goals is free with a subscription version giving you no ads and the “latest version” for $12 a year.

Daytum

is an in depth way of counting things that you do during the day and then presenting them to you in many different reports and groups. With Daytum you can add several different items to different custom categories such as work, school, home, etc. to keep track of your habits in each focus area of your life.

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Daytum is extremely in depth and there are a ton of settings for users to tweak. There is a free version that is pretty standard, but if you want more features and unlimited items and categories you’ll need Daytum Plus which is $4 a month.

Excel or Numbers

If you are the spreadsheet number cruncher type and the thought of using someone else’s idea of how you should track your habits turns you off, then creating your own Excel/Numbers/Google spreadsheet is the way to go. Not only do you have pretty much limitless ways to view, enter, and manipulate your goal and habit data, but you have complete control over your stuff and can make it private.

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What’s nice about spreadsheets is you can create reports and can customize your views in any way you see fit. Also, by using Dropbox, you can keep your tracker sheets anywhere you have a connection.

Evernote

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I must admit, I am an Evernote junky, mostly because this tool is so ubiquitous. There are several ways you can implement habit/goal tracking with Evernote. You won’t be able to get nifty reports and graphs and such, but you will be able to access your goal tracking anywhere your are, be it iPhone, Android, Mac, PC, or web. With Evernote you pretty much have no excuse for not entering your daily habit and goal information as it is available anywhere.

Evernote is free with a premium version available.

Access or Bento

If you like the idea of creating your own tracker via Excel or Numbers, you may be compelled to get even more creative with database tools like Access for Windows or Bento for Mac. These tools allow you to set up relational databases and even give you the option of setting up custom interfaces to interact with your data. Access is pretty powerful for personal database applications, and using it with other MS products, you can come up with some pretty awesome, in depth analysis and tracking of your habits and goals.

Bento is extremely powerful and user friendly. Also with Bento you can get the iPhone and iPad app to keep your data anywhere you go.

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You can check out Access and the Office Suite here and Bento here.

Analog Bonus: Pen and Paper

All these digital tools are pretty nifty and have all sorts of bells and whistles, but there are some people out there that still swear by a notebook and pen. Just like using spreadsheets or personal databases, pen and paper gives you ultimate freedom and control when it comes to your set up. It also doesn’t lock you into anyone else’s idea of just how you should track your habits.

Conclusion

I can’t necessarily recommend which tool is the best for tracking your personal habits and goals, as all of them have their quirks. What I can do however (yes, it’s a bit of a cop-out) is tell you that the tool to use is whatever works best for you. I personally keep track of my daily habits and personal goals with a combo Evernote for input and then a Google spreadsheet for long-term tracking.

What this all comes down to is not how or what tool you use, but finding what you are comfortable with and then getting busy with creating lasting habits and accomplishing short- and long-term goals.